This week millions of people in North America took to the streets to witness a total solar eclipse, a rare event that won’t be seen again until 2044. Some drove miles to experience the show, with people of all ages and backgrounds gathering to feel awe, fervour, delight. There is only one other phenomenon that brings people together in such a way: an Aldi Special Buy [™].
Rather than protective sunglasses, shoppers are better off arming themselves with helmets and shin pads, such is the excitement and panic of the Aldi middle aisle. I’ve always been fascinated by the middle aisle of this store because, unlike in the US, Australia doesn’t have the one-stop-shop culture of Walmart where you can pop in to buy milk and return home with everything under the (eclipsed) sun. Unlike a standard retailer, you never know what you’ll find in the mystifying and ever-changing Aldi middle aisle, which stocks … miscellaneous items.
It’s hard to describe what is sold in that section – maybe that’s why it’s simply known as The Middle Aisle. One week it will house a range of medical supplies and disability equipment, including full wheelchairs and TENS pain management machines. Next week it will be stacked to the ceiling with chainsaws. The middle aisle exists like a standalone stall at a bustling bazaar that you stumble across by chance and unexpectedly find the perfect thing you’ve been looking for. But when you return the next day, the stall has vanished, nobody knows what you’re talking about, and in fact some people tell you there never was a stall there at all.
It’s perhaps this unpredictability that drives shoppers to queue up outside stores to grab that once-in-a-lifetime item, like the 70,000 folks in the UK that lined up (both online and in person) during a pre-Christmas rush in 2022 to get their hands on something called Kevin the Carrot. Naturally this mania has resulted in more than one physical fight – if you feel like some light reading, just Google “Aldi brawl” and go nuts.
I find this phenomenon as captivating as the shoppers find that middle aisle, possibly because I’m not an Aldi shopper, and possibly because I do, unfortunately, find the idea of two people my age slapping each other to get their hands on a wicker chair extremely funny. It’s the visuals of folks quaintly lining up outside physical stores when online shopping has taken over (Oh, people still get out to grab a bargain, it’s important to support brick and mortar stores!) juxtaposed with a deranged horde mentality (Oh, that lady’s actually whacking that other lady on the head with a roll of wrapping paper!). Forget extreme sports, I’d rather watch this.
The obvious point here is that they must be providing products at an affordable price because you’d assume otherwise shoppers would simply go to a speciality retailer that permanently sells a much wider range of skiing equipment/televisions/children’s clothing/camping gear/motion-activated toilet bowl nightlights. Maybe it’s just convenience, with families working long hours and just wanting to get everything they need under the one roof. And maybe there are some agents of chaos who just love a good old-fashioned brawl.
As cost-of-living struggles make weekly grocery shops more and more expensive, I recently found myself on the Aldi website to compare prices of luxuries like bananas and rice. The first thing I noticed was that you wouldn’t know it’s a supermarket at all: the catalogues displayed electric bikes, Bluetooth sound bars, garden gnomes and something called a charcoal-infused memory foam pillow. Do they sell broccoli? The homepage had an alert that due to shipping delays, many of their Special Buys [™] may not be in store. If there’s one thing angry customers enjoy more than a fight with their peers it’s yelling at teenage employees for things outside their control.
I chose not to visit. They might make a middle aisle madman out of me one day, but not today.
• Deirdre Fidge is a writer and social worker who has written for ABC’s Get Krack!n and The Weekly with Charlie Pickering, and the BBC. Her work has appeared in ABC News, SBS, the Sydney Morning Herald and Frankie magazine
